But are all tax breaks created equal? Doesn’t it pay to differentiate? The article you cite notes that the jury is out: “There does not appear to be any clear evidence on whether these tax breaks are cost-effective.”

Maybe the problem is in lumping them all together and attempting to draw universal conclusions. Jill mentions, Raytheon and Fidelity as examples of incentives that have failed to deliver. By all accounts, she’s right on–the utilisation of the SSF scheme saved Raytheon literally tens of millions–and there were no provisiosn requiring them to drop a dime back following the thousands of job buyouts that ensued. Yes, that’s a fucking travesty. But that doesn’t mean that all these breaks are equally nefarious–any more than all the social programs on the line are good and successful and deserving of funding.

Today’s Globe highlights the potential upside to the local economy of a pretty sizeable award to Sanofi.

Will it pan out? I dunno. I don’t know which casinos are likely be better than others, which charter shools should be encouraged, which public schools should be shut right the hell down and started over from scratch, which social services shitcanned, which unions suported and which held at arm’s length, tax incentives tossed. That takes a LOT of freaking work–but it needs to be done. I do know that tarring-and-feathering (or lauding) things en masse is a dangerous game–it’s too easy to demonize or valorize. Generalizations make good quotes but bad policy.

Soooo….rather than lumping the whole kit’n-kaboodle together, might it be wise to advocate an independent commission with teeth that audits these type programs and attempts to draw conclusions about each–and, yes, ABSOLUTELY, taking into account those carry-forward losses, which likely escape the notice of many supporters of these programs? It’s like the flip-side of casinos–if too many studies don’t take the long-term extraneous costs of casinos into account, likewise, sometimes damning commercial tax incentives fails to adequately address the long-term positive implications for a specific neighborhood–and teh commonwealth as a whole–which will include some items not even susceptible to metric analysis (morale, safety, etc).

It’s also interesting that many voters are only too  thrilled to welcome corporations (and casinos for that matter)–with the price tag. They’re not the dupes of corporations, not “doing their bidding.” They’re screaming for ANY vestige of economic development. (True, people living under the gun don’t tend to think of those long term net losses to state revenue–and we need Jill, and posts like yours, to remind them of the same, since the electorate is nothing if not incapable of looking beyond next year. At best. But we also need implementable alternatives–and not rhetorical ones, either).

So, in regard to which: when we talk about bringing good manufacturing jobs to MA–do you really believe that we’re going to do so without offering them tax incentives? If someone’s going to open a large-scale plant building the arms for wind towers, or the frames for solar panels, is she going to locate in a state that offers no incentives–or site the operation in  Alabama? Let’s be real here. Unless you want nothing but a service economy in this state, you have be in the game. You may not love Raytheon and Fidelity because of what they do and represent, but you’re gonna need to shower those greening industries with some love, and the color of that love is gonna have to be a different shade of green.

I’m really leery about black-and-white arguments. Few things in life–tax incentive programs, casinos, charter schools, public education–are all-good or all-bad. It pays to read ALL the research available and to come to a more nuanced understanding, and then examine components on a case-by-case basis (e.g., see the Purcell quotes on charter schools that work) rather than simply praising or damning complex systems outright, which leads to a kind of ideological fundamentalism. In this fallen world, god must serve the devil.

And corporations are NOT our enemy. Not mine, anyway. Whether Sanofi is obscenely profitable or squeaking by (we all know the answer), that they’re developing oncological therapies makes it very difficult, today, for me to think of them as nothing but rapacious thugs. That makes what they’re doing a hell of a lot more meaningful to me today than what I–or most of us–are doing. I’m not arguing that they should be rewarded for their virtue–they’re in for the profits, and they reap ’em well god knows–but as corporations, they aren’t evil per se, and the endless references to “the corporations!” as though they’re the enemy is distressing. And strategically … well, that’s where a hell of a lot of VOTERS work, ya know?

It would be interesting if everyone involved in these debates were to note where they live, where they work (and how they get there), where they play, that we all come to an understanding of what subsidies and incentives allow many of US to prosper. At what teats are each of us sucking????

Again, I love that Jill and Jill alone is spotlighting the abuses. That GMG posters are reading and highlighting the fine print. No one else is. But nothing’s black and white. Why, I’ll even admit that there’s even possibly, conceivably, just MAYBE a case to be made for SOME slight downside to legalizing weed here in the Commonwealth. I know, I know–doubtful.